Monday, January 28, 2013

The following
reviews ran in January in the Waterloo Record and Guelph Mercury. Highly
recommended: Petra Haden, Kvety, Lee Harvey Osmond, Bob Wiseman.

Petra Haden - At
the Movies (Anti)

Roomful of Teeth -
s/t (New Amsterdam)

At the Movies is
all about choirs and show tunes, but this is definitely not Glee. Petra Haden
makes a cappella albums by layering her own voice into orchestras and
reinventing the familiar: her last album was an inventive full-length cover of
the album The Who Sell Out—which was arguably as good as the original. Here,
she takes the familiar trope of tackling famous movie theme songs. Occasionally
she dives into campy, novelty territory—how can the James Bond song “Goldfinger”
not be campy?—but more often than not she takes what could be a ridiculous
notion and turns it into something entirely transformational: the theme from
Psycho is actually far more frightening performed entirely by female voices
than by piercing strings.

Haden is mostly
dealing with instrumental material, naturally, but the occasional pop song (“It
Might Be You,” from Tootsie; “This is Not America,” from The Falcon and the
Snowman) sneaks in, as do three key instrumentalists in guest spots: pianist
Brad Mehldau, guitarist Bill Frisell and her father, bassist Charlie Haden. The
one time she strays close to cliché is “Calling You” from Baghdad Cafe, a torch
song staple of the last 25 years. Otherwise, you'd never expect a vocalist to
interpret Trent Reznor's score for The Social Network, or to pick the Superman
theme from John Williams' endless list of anthems--and Haden has the chutzpah
and the talent to reimagine iconic works in her own image.

Roomful of Teeth
are an eight-piece New York City vocal ensemble, in which Petra Haden would fit
right in. The group grew out of a circle of modern classical composers
revolving around the New Amsterdam label, which in turn is a younger
generational offshoot of Bang on a Can, the leading American avant-garde
collective of the last 30 years. Madrigals, Meredith Monk weirdness, Broadway,
Bulgarian harmonies, yodelling, Inuit and Tuvan throat singing--they cover just
about vocal tradition but doo-wop. Though it's often esoteric and edgy, they
can go for grandiosity, like on the enormous chorus with the odd lyric that
goes: “There is no subtlety in death / It’s like a hurricane / it’s like
Farrakhan,” by composer William Brittelle. They also collaborate with Merrill
Garbus of Tuneyards, who they've accompanied live, and who pens two key tracks
here (though she does not appear on them).

Should Petra Haden
hit the road for At the Movies, Roomful of Teeth would be the obvious choice to
be her hired backing band. And I dare your local high school glee club to
tackle anything from either of these records. (Jan. 24)

This Czech band
could never be accused of a one-note shtick. A lot of central and eastern
European rock music can be downright baffling to North American ears; while
Kvety are enchanting and intriguing: alien, yes (Czech is not a poetic language
when sung), but entirely inviting. The male vocalist’s soft delivery helps, as
does the dominant role of violin, but Kvety combine melody, old-world mystery
and unpredictable arrangements in an entirely original blend that begs easy
comparisons: but if pressed, I’d offer Welsh weirdo folk band Gorky’s Zygotic
Minci, early Pink Floyd, Swedish psychedelic jazz-rockers Dungen, Camper Van
Beethoven’s Key Lime Pie and Radiohead’s The Bends. Do those make sense
together? They do here. Considering the incredible 2012 album by Kvety’s
labelmates Dva, where are the articles in the international press about the
Czech music scene? It’s a matter of time.
(Jan. 31)

Download: "Kamosi," "Papousek noci," "My deti ze stanice Bullerbyn"

Lee Harvey Osmond
– The Folk Sinner (Latent)

Tom Wilson, of
Junkhouse and Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, has been a mainstay in Canadian
music for more than 20 years—a career, he often jokes, that has earned him
“tens of dollars” over that time. And yet ever since he reinvented himself as
Lee Harvey Osmond in 2009, it sounds like he’s just hitting his stride now.
This is where he teams up with the Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins, and
together they set Wilson’s haunting baritone and bluesy songs to spare and
spooky goth-folk arrangements centred around chugging, droning guitars and a
healthy dose of rockabilly reverb.

Guest stars lend a
hand: Hawksley Workman’s lovely falsetto on “Break Your Body,” a duet with Oh Susanna on “Big Chief,” the haunting harmonica of
Paul Reddick, and the unmistakable harmony presence of Margo Timmins. As
producer, Michael Timmins is careful never to crowd a song: all extraneous
elements—and plenty of excellent electric guitars, courtesy of Colin Cripps,
Colin Linden and Timmins—hover around the atmosphere, leaving the focus on the
spare rhythms and Wilson’s commanding, though subtle, presence.

It’s Canadiana
cottage-country weirdness at its finest, as well as a fine album by two guys
who’ve wanted to be wise, old ragged veterans ever since they were 25 years
old. Now that they are, they have even more to offer than they did in their
supposed prime. It’s far too early to begin compiling a best of 2013 list, but TheFolk Sinner is a good start. (Jan. 17)

Download: “Devil’s Load,” “Oh Linda,” “Honey Runnin’”

The Liminanas –
Crystal Anis (Hozac)

The Velvet
Underground’s debut album and a collection of Serge Gainsbourg’s ’60s hits: two
albums that every member of this Parisian band probably had in common growing
up. Fuzzy garage-rock guitars, primitive drums, whispered vocals, reedy organs
and minor-key menace flip the usually sunny French yé-yé sound on its head, and
wouldn’t sound out of place in an early Godard movie featuring reckless boho
youth who worship American fashion driving through the Left Bank. It’s a bit of
a one-note shtick, but that one note sounds fabulous. (Jan. 31)

Download: “Longanisse,”
“Belmondo,” “Betty and Johnny”

Minotaurs – New
Believers (Static Clang)

The last time we
heard from Guelph songwriter and drummer Nathan Lawr, he had abandoned his
singer/songwriter mode to embrace Afrobeat influences; here, on his second
album leading a project called Minotaurs, he returns with much of the same
band—featuring King Cobb Steelie bassist Kevin Lynn, Toronto’s most valuable
saxophone player Jeremy Strachan, pianist Shaw-Han Liem—and vocalists Casey
Mecija (Ohbijou) and Sarah Harmer, plus a full horn section and producer Paul
Aucoin at the helm. If the first Minotaurs album boasted only a few tracks that
burst with Lawr’s new-found confidence in this new territory, here he fully
inhabits the swagger necessary to pull this off, and his band—in particular the
horn section and the percussionists (Lawr, Aucoin and Jay Anderson)—is firing
on all cylinders. The only time he stumbles is when the tempo slows down, on
the closing “Windchimes in the Evening”—which is odd for a guy whose solo
career started out as a balladeer. Otherwise, he’s got his calling card for
summer festival season ready to roll. (Jan. 24)

As an electronic
musician, you can spend your whole life working on new patches for your
keyboards or ways to manipulate found-sound samples.

Or you could just
hire the bell carillon player for Oslo City Hall—who plays a three-tonne
instrument with over 60 bronze bells—and collaborate with a local composer and
Norwegian jazz players on tubular
bells, marimba, xylophone, cymbals and more, while you work subtle
manipulations and place subdued beats beneath it all.

Yes, there are
moments on Elements of Light
when you feel like Quasimodo has taken over a rave in the town square of a
small European town. But Pantha du Prince, the German producer whose 2010 album
Black Light is one of the
finest electronic albums of the past five years, moves this far beyond an
aesthetic gimmick and creates one of the few convincing compositions to bring
the influence of Steve Reich and Moondog to modern electronic dance music—even
if you’re unlikely to hear these tracks in an actual club, as Elements of Light is a much more
rewarding headphone experience than anything else. (Jan. 17)

For much
of the last 15 years, singer/songwriter Bob Wiseman has been working on film
and theatre projects, while his solo albums—which, in the ’90s, were wildly
eclectic Toronto all-star affairs that contained some of the most inventive and
politically provocative music of the era—became withdrawn, solitary and
somewhat humourless. For whatever reason, Wiseman has let the world back in to
his songs: not just in the studio, where he once again corrals his ideal
harmony vocalist Mary Margaret O’Hara and others, but in his songs. As the
obtuse title suggests, this is a collection of character sketches, with songs
about Fellini’s wife, former Haitian presidents, Neil Young and RCMP tasering
victims.

Wiseman
is the rare political songwriter who, at his best, can write extremely
specific, name-calling songs, and have them stand the test of time--as songs
from his first two proper solo albums, about government plots against native
activists and Greenpeace campaigners, have done so well. Here, he's back in
that mode, most successfully skewering anti-science conservative ideology in “The
Reform Party at Burning Man,” where he gets Serena Ryder to do a powerful rap
in the middle, notes with a sinister scowl about suppression of governmental information
that "what's especially
perverse is that this all feels rehearsed," and concludes the song by
repeating: “We didn't vote so / you could make a joke out / of people that are
broke.”

He's not
all piss and vinegar—far from it. What makes this return to form so enjoyable
is Wiseman's playful musicality, his skittery keyboards, his '50s-inspired
vocal arrangements, the inspired drumming of Mark Hundevad and the spot-on
saxophones of Shuffle Demon Richard Underhill. A touching ode to Wiseman's late
friend, actress Tracy Wright, is disguised in a song about a distrusted mutual
friend set to a “Whiter Shade of Pale” chord progression. The title track is
one of Wiseman's loveliest melodies ever, and “Neil Young at the Junos” is, for
Wiseman, an oddly reverent
song about a mainstream icon.

Together with the
recent success of his solo autobiographical theatrical piece, Actionable, this
is a welcome reminder of Wiseman's songwriting legacy, and proof that his best
work is far from behind him. (Jan.
31)

Download: “mothface@yahoo.com,”
“The Reform Party at Burning Man,” “Aristide at the Press Conference”

Yo La Tengo - Fade (Matador)

When Yo La Tengo
was the subject of a biography last year, many people—starting with the band members
themselves—wondered how such an artistically consistent, mild-mannered group
could possibly provide a compelling narrative for a book. Indeed, the author
instead used Yo La Tengo’s career as a way to explore the ebbs and flows of
alternative music in general in the last 25 years.

And so what does
one say about Yo La Tengo’s new album, their 13th proper
record, which is interchangeable with any of their albums from the last 15
years? Not that their well is dry: from the outset, this musically insatiable
trio have drawn from dream pop, country, R&B, free jazz, hardcore punk,
funk, ambient, squalls of feedback, avant-garde soundtracks and just about
everything else, all filtered through their generally soft-spoken, reverent
personas.

Yo La Tengo rarely
makes a wrong move, but much of Fade
sounds like the band on lithium: there is no standout track, the likes of which
even their weakest album can be counted on to provide; there is little
variation in tempo; and even the quietest moments (with the exception of the
stunning "Cornelia and Jane") often sound limp rather than softly powerful, which
is normally Yo La Tengo’s forte. Maybe it’s the introduction of producer John
McEntire (Tortoise), which marks the first time in 20 years the band has not
worked with longtime collaborator Roger Moutenot; maybe Moutenot brought more
to Yo La Tengo than anyone realized until now. (Jan. 17)

Monday, January 21, 2013

I spend most
Januaries (is that how you spell the plural of January?) reading various
year-end lists and catching up on records I missed. And I usually, against my
better financial judgment, end up spending way too much money on Boxing Day at Soundscapes
and Rotate This. Soundscapes’ year-end list proved very helpful (see the William Sheller, Personal Space comp and the Meridian Brothers); Rotate’s
decision to mark every CD in store down 50% made me feel somewhat better about
my indulgences.

The biggest
surprise for me (it was also a surprise I even bought it, but the Soundscapes
review was rather convincing) was Max Richter’s reinvention of Vivaldi’s The
Four Seasons on the Deutsche Grammophon label, which is amazing—however,
because I have nowhere near the language to write critically about it, you’re
just going to have to take my word on that.

Here’s a
round-up of other 2012 releases I reviewed this month for the Waterloo Record
and Guelph Mercury.

This
long-running compilation series attracts some fine curators, and almost every
installation is a worthy treat. Belle and Sebastian are the first to be invited
back, and with good reason. They’re not record-collector favourites without
reason: they have impeccable and diverse taste, ranging from Brazilian samba to
psychedelic prog to electronic sitar jams to modern chillwave to ’80s pop to
French chanson to, well, the undeniably awesome “Spinning Wheel” by Blood,
Sweat and Tears (one of the only recognizably popular tunes here, and one of
two Canadians—the other being obscure folk gem Bonnie Dobson). Remember when
your friends would make you mix tapes as good as this all the time? Be thankful
Belle and Sebastian are your friends. (Jan. 3)

Bjork – Bastards
(One Little Indian)

Since when is a
remix album better than the original? In the case of Bjork’s Biophilia, it
wasn’t that much of a challenge. As someone who finds something to love in
everything she does, I found that album tested even my patience. But here,
surrendering her vocals to the likes of largely unknown remixers, the Biophilia material is entirely recast: the two songs Syrian pop icon Omar
Souleyman tackles are indistinguishable from his own work and feature him in
full command as a vocalist, making Bjork’s presence barely noticeable; These
New Puritans strip most of the instrumentation away and set Bjork’s voice
against a sample of a Melanesian choir—which, you know, she was probably
thinking of doing anyway.

Bjork is so far
removed from pop music these days that we no longer expect her to write proper
songs; we can only hope to be swept up in the sonic world she creates. Biophilia’s failure was that while making music with a Tesla coil is
theoretically interesting, it doesn’t go down easily with lyrics like “Like a
mushroom on the tree trunk as the protein transmutates.” Whereas this group of
sonic scientists don’t treat anything she does as precious—maybe they should
all be hired immediately to work on her next proper record. (Jan. 3)

Julie Doiron has
spent half of her life in the public eye, and her best solo album, 2007’s Woke
Myself Up, dealt with divorce and doubt and rebirth—and, Doiron’s default
setting, loneliness. Where could she go from there?

On the opening
track here, she sings, “I’m writing this song to prove to myself that I can
still write songs.” That doesn’t bode well. And yet Doiron dances with both the
devil and angel on her shoulder here, giving their dialogue a voice in song, at
one moment expressing gratitude for her health and family while admitting that
she thinks she “can’t make it no more” and pleading, “I need another second
chance, for the 20th time in my life.” Albums about the depths of depression
are one thing; this one is by someone who is trying to hold her head up against
all—or at least many—odds.

Musically, Doiron
is once again working with Eric’s Trip bandmate Rick White; the results are
characteristically ramshackle yet charming. The surprise is that on several
occasions they step out of their ’90s lo-fi grunge-folk template and come up
with downright gorgeous arrangements with Fleetwood Mac-style harmonies.
Alternately, Doiron is at her most haunting and sparse on the track “Homeless,”
accompanied by just a bass guitar; there, she sounds more vulnerable than
ever—which is saying something, considering her discography.

So Many Days is in
some ways like Jodie Foster’s Golden Globe speech: is she retiring? Has she had
enough? Is this it? Because Doiron’s songs have always been so personal, it’s
hard to tell. But if nothing else, this album is proof that Doiron can still
pull off some new tricks. (Jan. 24)

Julie Doiron
plays January 24
in Waterloo at the Starlight Social Club, and on January
31 in Guelph at the Ebar.

Download: “Our
Love,” “The Only,” “Beneath the Leaves”

Jens Lekman - I
Know What Love Isn't (Secretly Canadian)

So much about Jens
Lekman is so wrong: the incredibly earnest, twee ESL lyrics, the schmaltzy
arrangements that make Belle and Sebastian sound muscular, the plaintive
Swedish croon. And yet Lekman remains endearing, in a Jonathan Richman sort of
way: how can you not like a guy who understands the importance of being earnest?

Sure, his double
entendres are cornier than Iowa. And the amount of proper names in his lyrics
makes you think he’s mostly writing these songs for his friends (or people who
like to think they know him and his friends personally). More than a few lines
could have been composed by eavesdropping in any café populated by
twentysomethings: “ ‘Hey, do you want to go see a band?’ ‘No, I hate bands /
it’s always packed with men spooning their girlfriends / clutching their hands,
as if they’d let go their feet would lift from the ground and ascend.’ ”

And yet Lekman is
smart enough to know that though the personal is universal, navel-gazing
doesn’t serve a larger purpose: “A broken heart is not the end of the world,
because the end of the world is bigger than love.” That is, of course, the
chorus of a song called “The End of the World is Bigger Than Love.” And he
manages to pull off an impossible feat of songwriting circa 2012: writing a
song about how hard it is to write a song after a breakup: on a song that
sounds as affecting as an early Leonard Cohen classic, he sings, “Every chord I
struck was a miserable chord / like an F minor 11 / or an E flat major 7 / it
all sounds the same / every chord knows your name.” (Jan. 10)

Multi-instrumentalist
Shawn Lee has put out 10 albums with his Ping Pong Orchestra, and at least 10
more as collaborations with various artists, including the funkiest Chinese
zither album you’re ever likely to hear (Bei Bei’s Into the Wind). And every
one is chock full of big-band jazz, exotica, funk, ’60s soundtracks, and dub
reggae, with nary a note out of place. This is one of his finer works. So why
doesn’t he get any respect? He needs a legend, other than being a hard-working
schlep who was raised in Kansas and now lives in London: his music career would
have to meet a tragic end and he’d have to have his work resuscitated 20 years
from now in order to get the props he deserves. In the meantime, here’s (yet
another) lovely and worthy entry into Lee’s world. (Jan. 10)

Download: “Mirror
Mirror,” “Spy Seduction,” “Soho Chase”

Meridian Brothers -
Deseperanza (Soundway)

The Meridian
Brothers—actually just one musician, Eblis Álvarez—mine traditional Colombian cumbia rhythms and
arrangements, but send it all through a space-age sci-fi filter, performed on
wiggly synths, tiny-sounding drum machines, and pitched-up vocals that put even
more of an alien sheen on the whole affair. It’s like Ween and Tom Zé went to
Bogota and locked themselves in a sweltering apartment with a four-track
recorder. The result is suitably strange, sweaty and sumptuous and not unlike a
22nd-century Esquivel. Worldly weirdos should dive
right in. (Jan. 17)

This Toronto singer
references Dolly Parton in the lyrics of the opening track here, and no wonder.
She shares Parton’s timbre, tone and range, and Ortega’s songs sound like they
could have been written any time during Parton’s 45-year career. If it’s her
stunning voice that is the immediate draw, Ortega has also employed producer
and sideman Colin Linden (Blackie and the Rodeo Kings) to steer this ship, with
predictably excellent results—even though he’s perhaps the most in-demand
sideman in Canada, he never steals the spotlight from Ortega’s voice. Behind
the mixing board is Darryl Neudorf, the sonic architect of Neko Case’s
spacious, spooky and lush discography. Both men take Ortega’s rockabilly roots approach
to country and give it a sheen that will easily apply to traditionalists, the
new country crowd and everyone who enjoys a tear in the beer and the occasional
two-step shitkicker. (Jan. 24)

Download: “Murder
of Crows,” “Heaven Has No Vacancy,” “Cigarettes and Truckstops”

We usually
think of home recording as having exploded in the ’80s, with hip-hop and punk
rock, particularly. But it was in the early ’70s that high-quality tape
recorders, primitive drum machines and synths all became somewhat affordable to
bedroom hobbyists. Rockists might have turned up their noses at these alien
sounds, but funk and soul musicians snapped them up: obviously Stevie Wonder and
Sly Stone and Shuggie Otis were all over this on their classic recordings, but
this collection gathers some entirely obscure, private-pressed records from the
era.

Some of it
could pass for the best soft-porn soundtrack you’ve ever heard—a lot of it, um,
intimate by design—and some presages the current chillwave movement. At its
best, however, this music takes the passion and the urgency of soul music and
sets it to an otherworldly backing, where a larger-than-life vocal presence
clashes with soft, pillowy—and often downright weird—sounds on songs titled “Starship
Commander Woo Woo” and “Disco From a Space Show.”

Some of these
artists were electric blues players; some played in popular Motown bands; some
were burned out from trying to make it big with conventional recordings; some
were aiming for mainstream success (like Johnnie Walker, who titled his album Farewell to Welfare for literal reasons; sadly, the song “Love Vibrator”
didn't land him any big royalty cheques). The latter were not entirely out of
bounds: after all, there isn’t that much separating a hit like Hall &
Oates’ “I Can’t Go For That” from tracks like Jeff Phelps’ “Super Lady” or T.
Dyson and Company’s “It’s All Over.”

A down-and-out
artist known only as Spontaneous Overthrow has a litany of things he laments he
can’t do “without money,” which he incants over a slinky, seductive yet ominous
beat, one of which is: “Can’t make this record!” And yet he did, and like
everyone else here, proved that you can make timeless, inspiring music with
next to nothing. (Jan. 3)

Before the
boogaloo, before the samba, before New York City fell under the sway of
Afro-Latin sounds in the late ’50s, there was Puerto Rican bomba and plena
music, which originated from local traditions and fused with Cuban rhythm
instruments and calypso, as well as plenty of accordion. According to the
curators of this compilation, the primary architects of this sound were in
Cortijo y su Combo, featuring percussionist Rafael Cortijo and singer Ismael
Rivera—one source quoted in the liner notes says, “In my house, Rivera is what
Elvis Presley was for the gringos.”

The Vampi Soul
label can always be counted on for loving assembly, exciting graphics and
quality liner notes, and Saoco is no exception. Along with their earlier
collection of Colombian cumbia, as well as Sounday’s Panama series and Tumbélé
compilation, it’s another valuable archive of Afro-Latin Caribbean musical
history that also sounds great at a party. (Jan. 10)

Imagine a
Catholic choral mass performed by Pink Floyd and Serge Gainsbourg in the early
’70s, and you have William Sheller’s Lux Aeterna. Trip-hop drum beats, string
sections, brass, flutes, oboes, slide guitar, some wigged-out pipe organ, a
full choir and—woah, wait, what the hell is that? Three minutes into the
opening track Sheller zaps us into space by throwing everything through flanger
and phaser pedals. Later on, a girlish voice starts talking about Jesus, John
and Paul, while spaceship sounds start whirling about. What does it all mean?

Lux Aeterna was written and recorded for a friend’s wedding in 1970 (must have been some
wedding), and then 2,000 copies were printed in 1972. Naturally, it became a
sought-after rarity in the interim; this is the first time it’s been available
since. It’s worth the wait, not just as a weirdo oddity, but as a lush,
majestic wonder. Sure, plenty of people today make music this singular and
strange, but no one commissions the Opera Orchestra of Paris to record it.

Sheller was
disheartened that the album didn’t achieve success at the time, but he went on
to sell hundreds of thousands of records in France later in the ’70s (with the
considerably less-appealing album title Rock ’n’ Dollars). This reissue
includes an earlier hit pop single and some soundtrack work, making the entire
package a more than welcome introduction to the strange and wonderful world of
William Sheller. (Jan. 3)

One is a Romanian
folk band where nonagenarians play traditional melodies at breakneck speed; the
other is a Macedonian brass band that makes your lips hurt just listening to
them. The nuances of the regional differences between the two are lost on this
urban Canadian, so I can’t vouch for the level of cross-cultural pollination
happening here (starting with the fact that one band is Orthodox Christian, the
other Sufi Muslims). This is the second time the bands have recorded together
since Kocani showed up on a handful of tracks on Taraf de Haidouks’ astounding
2001 live recording Band of Gypsies. While there are 27 musicians—including
four accordionists and a cimbalom player—doing acrobatic tricks around each
other, you’d never guess this ensemble hasn’t always been together. Yet despite
the tempos, it’s missing some of the fire of each band’s earlier records,
perhaps because there have been some lineup changes, perhaps because they each
compromised a bit to bend to the other. Either way, it’s sadly not as strong as
the sum of its parts. (Jan. 10)

Now that I’ve finally got around to changing my calendar, I’m
reminded of my favourite live moments of 2012. I don’t get out much anymore,
largely due to parenting but also because of a busier-than-expected second half
of 2012, so we’ll just talk about five gigs.

1. Tuneyards
(The Phoenix, Aug. 1). My favourite album of 2011 sounded even better after a
full 18 months on the road. Merrill Garbus has never lacked confidence, but as
a huge fan who had seen her before, I didn’t expect to be so blown away yet
again. The new choreography from the horn section was also a nice touch.
Joyous, visceral, and completely cathartic.

2. Orchestre
Poly-Rhythmo (Harbourfront, July 13). There was a time when much of my Toronto
summers were defined by Harbourfront’s music programming. That’s less true now,
but every so often a show like this comes around that reminds me what a gift
the free venue is to the city. These Beninese legends from the ’70s have put
out over 100 albums, of which I’ve heard maybe two. They live up to their name,
as every track had an astounding number of rhythmic layers that added up to a
feverish dance party perfect for a hot summer night on the water.

3. Fanfare
Ciocarlia / Lemon Bucket Orchestra (The Hoxton, Sept. 21). Speaking of old guys
who can still get it up, this Balkan brass band blast through blistering tempos
that leave most men one-quarter their age gasping for air. Most men, that is,
who aren’t in perfectly simpatico Toronto openers Lemon Bucket Orchestra.

4. Corb Lund
(Danforth Music Hall, Nov. 23). When Corb Lund puts out a beginning-to-end
great album, as he did this year with Cabin Fever, you almost have to worry
that some of his earlier classics will get squeezed off the set list. But with
so many two-minute miracles scattered across his discography, Lund and his crack
band almost suffer from too much of a good thing. Throw in a mid-set political
tangent, including the rural vs. oil company prayer “This is My Prairie” and a
cover of Geoff Berner’s “That’s What Keeps the Rent Down,” and you have a full
evening’s worth of entertainment.

5. The Magic
(Great Hall, Aug. 10). When you’ve been a live band for five years gearing up
to release your debut, damn straight you’re going to be tight. But just for
kicks, why not stage the show as a ’70s TV taping with a raunchy MC in drag,
played with aplomb by Keith Cole, who hectors unsuspecting members of the
studio audience? What could easily have been a silly mess was instead a
polished performance, with lead vocalists Geordie Gordon and Sylvie Smith
inducing libidinous squeals from the eager crowd.